November 13, 2002

Maybe the Daily Planet would cover this better CNN and other news sources carry word that Spider-man co-creator Stan Lee is suing Marvel Comics, claiming that the company is not honoring a 1998 agreement to pay him a 10% share of the profits from the use of Spider-man and other characters he created in films or television shows. The articles and a heated Slashdot discussion all mention the huge revenues of the Spider-man movie, including its $400 million US gross. However except for a few lone posters on Slashdot that don’t mention that nearly all of these revenues go to Sony Corp which licensed the characters from Marvel and took the $150 million risk to make a movie based of a comic book character. In fact Marvel has only so far received $14.5 million from Sony for licensing the rights. Therefore while $1.5 million is a fair amount of money to is nowhere near 10% of hundreds of millions of dollars. 10:50:36 PM

Cool Toy Step-Up Computing reveals a much cheaper competitor to Windows XP Tablet computers. 10:49:21 PM

When protesters about Concordia University in Montreal prevented Benjamin Netanyahu many said it was because he was a war criminal. Well the same brush is being applied to Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak before upcoming appearance at the University of California at Berkeley and plans are being made to prevent him from speaking. (From Kesher Talk) 12:18:21 AM